Episode 1200: More Essay Progress...

I think I've figured out how to proceed after the introductory paragraph, in the sense of what the flow of my argument needs to be in order to cover all the ground that I want to by the end of the essay. I've had to tweak the introduction a little, although it's still quite jargon-free when it comes to the actual thesis statement. I've made peace with that though. Now it's how to fit in this huge chunk of quotes from the poem itself. I was going to just dump them in one chunk and then proceed with the close reading for this portion of the essay from there, but it's been pointed out to me that that's quite inelegant. I'm going to leave it for now and write out the close reading bits tomorrow, and then see if I can splice the quotes in more naturally. I'm sure it's possible, just that it's more expedient to go about it the way I'm doing. Would stay up tonight to write more, since I find it a lot easier to just do straightforward close reading as opposed to trying to situate stuff within a wider theoretical framework (although I have one in mind for the essay too), but I've got a bit of a headache. Probably, ironically, from staring at the laptop screen for so long.